How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (10 page)

At the height of this moment, Amsterdam elected a string of Jewish mayors. There was a cultural context for these moves: The Dutch had begun to rediscover and celebrate their history of resisting the Nazi inva-sion. Starting in the sixties, annual commemorations trumpeted the heroism of a February 1941 mass strike that had been waged to protest the Nazi occupation.

And the Dutch did as much as anyone to cultivate the cult of Anne Frank and the righteous gentiles who guarded her family in an Amsterdam attic.

But more than rediscovering this history of resistance, the Dutch fabricated it. As historians have pointed out tirelessly in recent years, the Dutch did a better job collaborating with the Nazis than stopping them. Holland lost a higher percentage of its Jews to the Holocaust than any other country. In cosmopolitan, tolerant Amsterdam, identifying with the Jews in the Ajax style fit this project of reinvention and guilt assuagement. David Winner, an English journalist who wrote
Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch
Soccer,
argues that Ajax engages in an “unconscious act of post-Holocaust solidarity with the city’s murdered, missing Jews.”

This is a generous interpretation, and it may contain some significant sociological truth. But it’s a bit too sympathetic to the Dutch quest for redemption. The Dutch haven’t come as far as they like to believe. Empathy for the Jews in the soccer stadium has dark underpinnings. The essence of anti-Semitism has been the
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE JEWISH QUESTION

treatment of the Jews as something alien, as dangerous interlopers, a state within the state. For two hundred years, a significant swath of European Jews struggled to move past these canards. Even Zionists like Max Nordau, who touted the idea of the Jewish state, ultimately craved nothing more than acceptance as full-fledged Europeans. They dreamed of assimilation.

Unfortunately, after the Holocaust and the founding of Israel, this acceptance still hasn’t really arrived. Even when the Europeans identify with the Jews, as in the Ajax and Tottenham cases, they confirm that the Jews are foreigners, not like themselves. They still treat Jews as bizarre curiosities, reducing them to alien symbols—yarmulkes, sideburns, a Star of David.

There’s a parallel to the American use of Indians as their sporting mascots, as in the case of the Washington Redskins, Cleveland Indians, and Florida State Seminoles. It is possible to argue that these nicknames are compliments, a tribute to the bravery and fighting spirit of the Native Americans. And isn’t obeisance a better way to treat the aborigines than slaughtering them? But there’s a sizeable flaw in this reasoning.

Americans can only pay this kind of obeisance because they have slaughtered the Indians. Nobody is around to object to turning them into cartoon images. This perversely worsens the problem. The cartoon images of the mascots freeze the Indians in time, portraying them as they lived in the nineteenth century at the time of the west’s conquest, wearing leather suits and feather head-dresses. It becomes impossible to imagine the remaining Indians ever transcending their primitivism, ever leaving their reservations and assimilating into society.
The same sort of cartoon image has aºicted the European Jews. No matter how hard they try, they’re stuck as outsiders and “others” in the continental mind. This treatment confirms an old aphorism, a bit strong but still truthful: a philo-Semite is an anti-Semite who loves Jews.

But to leave the argument there is a bit too simple.

Europe has come a long way since the war. In part, it has changed on its own. It recoiled against the horrific deeds that it had committed—and it has swung into a militant opposition to racialism, militarism, and nationalism. Ironically, this political correctness has made it irrationally uncomfortable with Israel’s unapologetic defense of Jewish nationhood and insistence on military response to terrorism. When Europe descends into anti-Semitism, it’s now motivated more by an uncompromising commitment to enlightenment ideals than inherited hatred toward Christ killers. Mark Lilla, the University of Chicago political theorist, has written, “Once upon a time, the Jews were mocked for not having a nation-state. Now they are criticized for having one.” He continues, “Many Western European intellectuals, including those whose toleration and even a¤ection for Jews cannot be questioned, find [Israel]

incomprehensible. The reason is not anti-Semitism nor even anti-Zionism in the usual sense. It is that Israel is, and is proud to be, a nation-state—the nation-state of the Jews. And that is profoundly embarrassing to post-national Europe.”

Europe has also changed because of globalization.

Most noticeably, the continent has been inundated with immigrants. Before the war, Jews and Gypsies were the
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE JEWISH QUESTION

outsiders who bore the brunt of European culture’s contempt for otherness. The arrival of Senegalese, Pak-istanis, and Chinese hasn’t endowed European nationalism with a significantly more multi-ethnic idea of the state. But it has di¤used hatred, so that it doesn’t fix on a single ethnic group worthy of elimination. You can see this in the soccer stadium very clearly. Raw anti-Semitism is anomalous. Most of the hatred in soccer now focuses on blacks in the form of ape noises and racist taunts emanating from the crowd and players.

And outside the stadium, it is often Muslims who now su¤er bigotry of the majority.

Just as important, the so-called Jewish soccer clubs like Tottenham and Ajax are a major leap forward from pogroms and
Einsatzgruppen.
Instead of denouncing the Jews as pollutants to the nation, chunks of the working class have identified themselves as Jewish, even if only in the spirit of irony.

Of course, there remain places in Europe with far less irony than others.

IV.

Outside the stadium in the old German quarter of southern Budapest, the police line up fans and frisk them. Although they weed out knives and projectiles, they’re much more interested in preventing the entry of painted banners that bring unwanted attention to their country. It’s testimony to Hungarian policing —

or perhaps to the determination of fans—that they rarely achieve their goal. Supporters of the club Ferenc-
varos wrap the banners around their bodies and conceal them beneath their clothes. Before games, they unfurl the sheets so that they extend over entire rows.

One begins, “The trains are leaving. . . .” The second concludes, “. . . for Auschwitz.”

This slogan is pretty much all you need to know about the atmosphere in the arena. But what makes Ferencvaros so impressive isn’t just the depth of their hatred; it’s the breadth of it. They have an unending array of Dr. Mengele–inspired songs and chants. Lyrics typical of the genre include, “Dirty Jews, dirty Jews, gas chambers, gas chambers.” Another set repeats the mantra, “Soap, bones.” As if the death camp imagery wasn’t clear enough, Ferencvaros fans press their tongues into their palates to produce a hissing that mimics the release of Zyklon B. For a time in the nineties, they would punctuate the celebration of goals with an extension of the arm into a Nürnberg-style salute.

Ferencvaros aren’t especially careful about whom they tar as “Dirty Jews.” Most all their Hungarian opponents get smeared this way. But they reserve their most hateful behavior for one longtime archenemy, another Budapest club called MTK Hungaria. In fairness, Ferencvaros are far from alone in smearing MTK.

At a glance, this disdain looks like resentment.

MTK has a long record of success. The team has won twenty-one national championships and finished second eighteen times. With a deep-pocketed owner, they have ushered in a recent renaissance, taking three of the last five Hungarian Cups to the victory stand. Usually, a winning streak like this builds a sturdy band-
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE JEWISH QUESTION

wagon that runs roughshod over the resenters. Eight-year-old boys can’t resist attaching themselves to a jug-gernaut. Adult fans, who remain closeted when their team muddles along, proudly announce their allegiance by hanging an emblem from their car’s rearview mirror. But the strange fact about MTK is that their success has brought no such increase in their following. Even during championship seasons, it’s lucky if it can attract more than a thousand of its own supporters to home games. Followers of the visiting team frequently out-number them.

The management of MTK won’t oªcially admit it, but its supporters will: The reason it has so few fans and so many enemies is because it is a Jewish club.

That is to say, MTK was founded by downtown Jewish businessmen in 1888, and in the early twentieth century the team consisted largely of Jewish players. Before the end of World War I, this wasn’t such a terrible stigma. Jews had been early and fiery promoters of Hungarian nationalism. Unlike Hakoah, MTK had no Zionist agenda. In fact, the M in MTK stood for Mag-yar, explicitly tethering the club’s Jews to the cause of Hungarian nationalism. The team even self-consciously placed its stadium on the Hungaria Road. In return for their fidelity to the cause, the Jews won acceptance in Budapest society. The city’s accommodating atmosphere swelled the community into one of the most massive aggregations of Jews on the planet, so much so that James Joyce, among others, dubbed it “Judapest.”

After the breakdown of the Hapsburg Empire and Hungary’s disastrous experiment with communist revolution in 1919, this comfortable coexistence ended.
Jews emerged as the nationalist politicians’ scapegoat of choice. These politicians, and their newspapers, homed in on MTK as a potent symbol of the pernicious-ness of the Jew. They ascribed the crudest anti-Semitic stereotypes to the club—money grubbing, rootless mercenaries, dirty players. In the forties, these nationalists came to power and aligned themselves with the Nazis. They shuttered MTK entirely because of its ethnic aªliation. After World War II swept out these Iron Cross fascists, the communists reopened MTK for business. The party handed control of the club to a succession of patrons from the trade unions and secret police.

But no matter the patron, the club’s identity has never changed. Despite the many e¤orts of supporters and management, the perception of Jewishness could never be scrubbed from MTK. Even now, in the democratic era, as Hungary enters the European Union, very few gentiles support MTK. It still means crossing a social barrier that even the most liberal, open-minded Hungarians don’t often traverse. To them, wearing an MTK jersey is akin to wearing a yarmulke. The result is that one of the two best teams in Hungary has become a ghetto in the oldest European sense of the word, a dis-tillation of the European Jewish condition, the bitter-sweet mingling of the greatest success and lonely misery.
u

H o w S o c c e r E x p l a i n s

t h e S e n t i m e n t a l H o o l i g a n

I.

To my knowledge, there is only one example of the converse of Tottenham’s Yid Army: a Jewish soccer fan who proudly taunts opposing teams with anti-Semitic insults. I know him by his nom de guerre, Alan Garrison.

His surname is an alias that he adopted almost thirty years ago to complicate dealings with the police. Since the age of five, Alan has supported Tottenham’s West London rivals, Chelsea. He deserves his own page in the history book, and not just as an oddity. By the mid-nineteen-sixties, he was a commander in one of the first organized crews of English soccer hooligans. He practi-cally invented the genre. Under his leadership—that is until he spent much of the seventies and eighties in prison—Chelsea began to emerge as the most storied band of soccer thugs on the planet, the group with the greatest capacity for hate and destruction.

But before describing this contribution to European civilization, I must qualify my characterization of Alan as a Jew. And I admit that this is not a small qualification. Alan Garrison’s German father served as a lieutenant in Hitler’s SS. The Allies charged him with war crimes committed in the Russian campaign,

although they never prosecuted the case. When British troops in the south of France shot him in the stomach and legs, everything in his life suddenly and strangely inverted. The Allies captured his riddled body and mer-cifully sent it to heal in an Edinburgh military infirmary. As he lay sprawled in his medical dress and entirely dependent on the goodness of his adversary, he fell madly in love with his Scottish-Jewish nurse, and she with him. In 1946, they had Alan, the first of their three Aryan-Jewish children. It was a match made to inflame. Both the mother’s family and community fero-ciously shunned them. When this shame and stigma became too great to bear, they fled with their baby to a new, less fraught, more anonymous life in London.

From the looks of Alan’s adult visage—doughy

face, droopy eyes, English teeth, big glasses, feathery gray hair—he would have had a hard time on the play-ground no matter what his pedigree. His mixed parent-age didn’t help his case on the asphalt. “Dumb kike,”

the heartless kids would call out one day, kicking and bullying him. “Fuckin’ Nazi Hun,” they would yell the next, reenacting their anti-Semitic pogrom as a heroic advance against Hitler’s bunker.

Alan’s identity became a drag. When his mother wanted him to become a Bar Mitzvah, he flatly refused.

He told her, poor lady, that he had given up on the Jew-
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SENTIMENTAL HOOLIGAN

ish religion all together. From that day forward, he would practice paganism and worship the goddess Isis, part of a faith his art teacher had explained in a course on ancient civilization. Alan made other resolutions to himself. He would become strong. He would take up boxing and use his combinations against any fool who dared insult him. He would do whatever he could to ingratiate himself with the crowd of tough lads. By befriending them, he would be surrounding himself in a protective bubble that could repel all attackers.

On Alan’s fifth birthday, his father, now an accountant, gave him a break from the pummeling. He took him to watch their local club, Chelsea, play in the Stamford Bridge stadium. West London in those days didn’t yet have sushi restaurants or latte bars. Chelsea, both the neighborhood and the club, had hardly a hint of the glamour or cosmopolitanism that so define it now. On weekdays, dogs would race on the track that wrapped around the soccer field. In the Shed, like large parts of English soccer stadiums before the 1990s, there was no place to sit, just terraces of concrete. You could cram a seemingly unending amount of humanity into these terraces, and the ticket-takers were never really inclined to cut o¤ the flow. The stadium, so filled with passion and camaraderie, overwhelmed Alan. This, too, he wanted in his life. As he got a bit older, he began going to games on his own and grew chummy with the other kids who haunted the Shed. They loved the football, to be sure, but they also liked to behave badly.